Medicine under ideological influence
After their first book, The Factory of the Transgender Child (2022), the two authors (both psychoanalysts and respectively child psychiatrist and university professor) throw a new spanner in the works to alert people to the excesses of a medicine blinded by ideology, to the point of forgetting the foundations of its ethics: the pillar of the Hippocratic oath, non-nocturnal primum ("above all do no harm") is replaced by pro bono agere ("act for good"). To the point that some medical schools have already modified the text of this oath written in IVe century BC: since 2022, the University of Connecticut School of Medicine has been offering a “DEI-fied” version (a play on words between DEI and the participle) deified) which invites students to take an oath to Social Justice and DEI, and removes the pledge to do no harm, replacing it with: "I commit to identifying and mitigating my own biases", "I will actively support policies promoting social justice". The Minnesota faculty asked its students to pledge allegiance to indigenous medicines, with references to racism, and the Columbia faculty did the same. For woke moralism, sending a twenty-five-century-old text, the foundation of Western medicine, to oblivion is just a minor detail in the vast enterprise of liquidating a multi-millennial anthropology.
Children sick with ideology
The book The sermon of Hippocrates1 unfolds in seven factual and precise chapters, which attempt to provide an explanation for the success of the excessive medicalization of minors suffering from gender disorders. Before getting to the heart of the demonstration, the first chapter immerses us in the reality of this suffering: it presents the parallel diaries of a teenager between the ages of 13 and 18, and of her father who resists the doctors and activists of an association called here "L'Abri". In twenty minutes of consultation, this disoriented young girl is diagnosed with "gender dysphoria", prescribed puberty blockers and started on the path of transition, without her discomfort ever being questioned. Thanks to her father's resistance, she ends up reconciling with her birth sex without suffering "irreversible damage", to use Abigail Shrier's expression. But for a story that ends well, how many minors are mutilated in the name of Good?
Chapter 2 returns to the multiple censorships suffered by the two authors since the publication of their previous book: harassment, threats, canceled conferences, calls for auto-da-fé, vandalized café... Spearheading the fight against the ravages of trans-affirmative ideology on minors, both created the Little Mermaid Observatory and submitted in 2024 a bill on the trans-identification of minors, adopted by the Senate.
Orvietism: a medicine in the service of beliefs
Chapter 3, Orvietism or the art of practicing medicine in the service of an ideology, proposes a neologism to designate medicine in the service of ideologies: orvietism, from the name of the orvietan, this miracle cure sold by charlatans at fairs in the Ancien Régime. Orvietism is an "imposture based on a rhetorical device using scientificity" (jargon, neologisms inspired by activism), using euphemism (torsoplasty = removal of breasts), moralizing metaphors (transphobia, patriarchy, egalitarianism, inclusivism, visibility), denial of biological reality, victimization, pathos and hyperbole: "do you want a living boy or a dead girl?"
The authors cite examples of Orvietism in the history of the last two centuries, the most famous being Lysenkoism. Trofim Lysenko, who denounced genetics as a bourgeois science and claimed to apply Marxist dialectics to nature, was knighted by Stalin and Khrushchev, while his opponents were condemned to death as enemies of the people. Mutatis mutandis, for gender ideologues, it is necessary to denaturalize the difference between the sexes to make sex change possible. And to better accredit this fiction, falsify the results and eliminate the detractors, no longer physically but socially.
Another example is Egas Moniz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1949 for "his discovery of the therapeutic value of leucotomy in treating certain psychoses" – an operation that involves removing part of the prefrontal cortex, at the risk of leaving the patient apathetic. Having undergone this procedure at the age of 23, Rosemary Kennedy remained disabled for the rest of her life.
Third example, the medicalization of homosexuals. The assimilation of homosexuality to a mental illness, which lasted until 1973, led to a series of treatments, operations, castrations, hormone therapy, etc. As for so-called "hysterical" women, they underwent genital mutilation throughout the XNUMXth century.e. Female genital mutilation was practiced for women's health... just as mutilation is practiced today for the health of trans-identified minors. Cutting off breasts to eliminate psychological suffering follows the same logic. As for cross-fertilization hormones, they create the sterility advocated by some eugenicists.
According to Pierre-André Taguieff, eugenicists and transhumanists share the idea that religious beliefs must be replaced by a new faith: ensuring the well-being of future generations by reshaping human nature. This idea is the trace of a recurring childhood desire: "to eliminate everything that limits the desire for power."
The fourth chapter, The art of changing sex, traces the history of sex reassignment medicine, of which the main stages are as follows. Its pioneer, Magnus Hirschfeld (1868-1935), who in The transvestites, distinguishes between sexual desires and gender expressions, performed the first sex reassignment surgery in 1906 on Martha/Karl Baer, a young woman who probably suffered from a rare genetic disease, Klinefelter syndrome. In 1919, Hirschfeld opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin, the first clinic offering advice and treatment to homosexuals and transsexuals. Lili Elbe, the first transgender woman, died of an infection after the fifth operation. It was in this clinic that surgeon Erwin Gohrbandt performed the first "MtF" (male to female) surgery in 1931, via a vaginoplasty. He then joined the Nazis and sterilized 360 disabled people before euthanizing them. When Éric Zemmour compares these experiments to those of Mengele, it is excessive but not false. The project of such medicine is to act in the name of Good to impose self-proclaimed norms on society, through intimidation and censorship.
In 1975, psychiatrist Paul McHugh of Johns Hopkins Hospital commissioned a study of adults who had undergone sex reassignment. The inconclusive results and the lack of evidence of improved well-being led to the clinic's closure in 1979. McHugh admitted that doctors had wasted their time "collaborating with madness instead of studying it, trying to cure it, and ultimately preventing it."
The 1990s marked a turning point: trans activists took power within the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA), forcing the cautious Stephen B. Levine to resign. In 1997, the organization became the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH).
Transversion and Posthumanism: Towards a New Man-Ideology
Gender theory owes much to John Money, the "cumbersome inventor" of sinister memory, adored and then disowned by Butler. His thesis on hermaphroditism extrapolated general laws from extremely rare cases. In a 1955 article, he used for the first time the concepts of "gender identity" and "gender role," which were not established at birth but entirely constructed. Money took as guinea pigs the Reimer twins, Bruce and Brian, who were perfectly healthy except for Bruce's accidentally burned penis; Money advised his parents to castrate him and raise him as a girl. Bruce became Brenda and took feminizing hormones. A fervent defender of pedophilia and incest, Money, without his parents' knowledge, forced the twins into sexual games and made them mime mating. At the age of 14, Brenda learned of her sex reassignment in early childhood. At 15, he chose to become a boy again and became David; he then received testosterone, underwent phalloplasty (through 18 operations), and married a woman, disproving Money's theory. Money knowingly concealed the fact that his hypotheses were not verified. The scandal was revealed in 1997 by a journalist, John Colapinto, in a book translated into French in 2014. Milton Diamond, a professor of reproductive biology, also published a highly critical article in 1982. In addition to his perverse behavior with children, Money falsified data and saw the criticism leveled at him as a far-right conspiracy—any resemblance to a current situation would be purely coincidental. Brian committed suicide in 2002 and David in 2004: the outcome of the first documented case of sex reassignment. Other intersex children suffered from these treatments, leading Butler to disassociate herself in 2005 from the support given to Money by radical feminists.
The Netherlands is a pioneer in reassignment care, reimbursed since the 1970s: Vanderbilt University Medical Center bases its approach on compassion. The "Dutch Protocol" prescribes blockers at the first signs of puberty, then hormones at age 16. It was invented by an endocrinologist, Henriette Delemarre-van de Waal, in 1987, and published in 2006, with strict eligibility criteria (onset of dysphoria in early childhood, no comorbidity, etc.). But these criteria were quickly eliminated: blockers were prescribed from age 8, hormones at 14, and family consent was deemed unnecessary. In the 2010s, the Dutch Protocol became the standard treatment for "gender dysphoria." One patient even died because her intestine necrotized following removal for vaginoplasty.
The side effects of blockers are well-known: osteoporosis, negative effects on cognitive and emotional development – since they halt brain maturation. In addition, 90% of children taking blockers go on to take cross-hormones.
In just a few years, WPATH has become the international authority on gender medicine. Its recommendations are applied almost everywhere: only Finland, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and 26 states in the United States have dissociated themselves from its recommendations and regulate the prescription of puberty blockers. And yet, since the 7 SOC-2012 (Standards of Care), these recommendations have borne the imprint of transactivist ideology: WPATH calls for the depsychologization of gender variance, hence the replacement of "gender identity disorder" with "gender dysphoria" (2008), and suggests that mental health problems are linked to the stress of stigmatized minorities. SOC-8 (2022) clearly goes too far: it advocates free access to blockers, hormones, and surgery, with no minimum age, while removing the chapter on ethics contained in the first version of the text.
This 8e The standard of care is creating a scandal under the Biden administration. In June 2024, an Alabama court revealed compromising documents regarding the SOC-8's evaluation of the evidence. These documents show that members of WPATH skewed the results, suppressing all evidence that did not support the recommendation of unconditional access to this care, omitting scientific studies that did not prove the safety of the treatments, and publishing only those that supported the medicalization of minors. Lawyers specializing in minority rights wrote these standards so that state laws could not attack them. Rachel Levine, the (trans) assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), notably pushed to remove any age limit. WPATH lied by hiding all the scientific evidence that did not support its position. However, this scandal has not received the attention it deserves, especially in Europe.
Another neologism proposed by the two psychologists, the transversion (trans perversion) is a political project, supported by an ideology that involves denial of reality and paradigm shift. Transversion is based on the oppressor/oppressed dialectic and leads to the totalitarianism of the individual. Talking about biological sex has become a crime. To unfold, this perversion requires a specific sociopolitical context, a profound democratic crisis. It stems from what Bruno Chaouat calls the "sadism of good."
Thus, some doctors have modified the Hippocratic Oath by recommending not questioning the requests of trans-identified minors, whom they no longer claim to treat because they are not ill. Is supporting such a request while abandoning all reference to adolescent psychology a matter of medicine? – the authors ask.
Chapter 5 is titled Pedomy or the virtuous hatred of the childThe latest neologism proposed by the two psychologists, pedomisy or hatred of the child, covers mistreatment, pedophilia and incest, all criminal attitudes resulting fromlovemaking (Lacan), a mixture of love and hate. According to Charles Melman, our society has moved from neurosis to perversion, from a culture of repression to a culture of pleasure at all costs. The medicine of care is becoming a service medicine. The relationship with pain has changed: not suffering is becoming the expression of a right—consider the opioid scandal that led to 500 overdose deaths in the United States. Doctors adhere to a utopian vision according to which, thanks to hormones, each individual would heal from their suffering and become reconciled with their body. Some young people hate a part of their body (such as breasts); but activist doctors express their hatred through their love for bodily stigmata and mutilation.
In the United States, mastectomies are performed from the age of 12. The potential profit from the gender industrial complex has been estimated in the United States at more than $200 billion (for 1 million affected people). The Trans Man (2019), Bruno Chaouat asks himself under what conditions the ancestral desire to change man can respect medical ethics, and gives this answer: techno-medicine respects ethics if it sticks to remediation, but becomes ideology when it considers man as always already to repair, improve, augment, considering it as a priori defective. Thus transgenderism is part of posthumanism, which promotes a transformation of man by artificial means and reduces him to an object that can be shaped at will. "The hatred of the human condition cultivated by posthumanism risks representing for decades to come one of the greatest challenges that our history will have to face."
From now on, the educational ideal is no longer submission, but the development and autonomy of the child, without respecting the stages of his development. The individual child must be made a subject as early as possible, because he knows what is good for him. However, this representation of the child is "a formidable and massive rejection of his identity as a child, of his psychic prematurity, of his particularity." According to Arendt, "this means only one thing, that adults refuse to assume responsibility for the world in which they have placed their child." However, autonomy is expressed through self-determination, the keystone of education. But granting the child the possibility of choosing before he has the capacity to do so is to confront him with an insurmountable burden.
Marcel Gauchet, in “The Child of Desire” (Debate 2004) was the first to understand that the desired child is also, by definition, the rejected child. The society that promotes the child of desire is objectively the society of child rejection.
The pedophile ideology, which sparked petitions in the 1970s and confused child sexuality et child sexuality, today arouses just disapproval. However, traces of it can be found in the Standards for sexuality education in Europe (2010), a reference framework for the WHO. Every child has a sexuality, erogenous zones, and gradually evolves towards an adult sexuality, from which they must be protected at all costs until they reach the required age. However, the recommendations adopted by the WHO overlap with pedophile ideology by advocating the early development of a shared sexuality and by considering children as individuals capable of consenting to sexual relations. They recommend informing children from 0 to 4 years old about the pleasure linked to their body and early masturbation; between 4 and 6, informing them about the sensations linked to sexuality; from the age of 4, the child must be informed of their "right to explore sexual identities". From 12 to 15 years old, the WHO teaches children "how to enjoy sexuality adequately". According to the authors, the WHO may have inspired the 2023 French circular on sex education in schools, under the supervision of the Ministry of Health. Educational platforms offer "pleasure composition" games, an explicit invitation to masturbation, and a game: "Who wants to win pleasure?" for ages 12 and up, even though the effects of pornography are well-known and, by law, a minor under 15 is considered incapable of consenting to sexual intercourse. We are led to believe that, from the age of 9, they would be mature enough to take puberty blockers and, from the age of 16, cross-hormones.
An ethical alert: the return of the clinic
Chapter 6 focuses on the Cass Report. Published on April 10, 2024, this report represents the first major challenge to transaffirmative medicine. Pediatrician Hilary Cass commissioned a team of researchers from the University of York to conduct a systematic review of so-called gender-affirming care, using an impeccable clinical approach. She also conducted numerous interviews with young people, their parents, and professionals.
The report contains a series of recommendations: a ban on puberty blockers, which have no proven safety; treatment that prioritizes a psychological approach; and the need to limit prescriptions for cross-hormone replacement therapy—surgery for minors is already banned in Great Britain. It recommends applying these precautions to minors and young people up to the age of 25.
The NHS has highlighted the importance of this report and decided to implement it from August 2024. Young people in gender distress will now be treated holistically. The Cass report, whose findings are published on government websites, marks the end of the abusive medicalization of young people suffering from gender disorders. The Labour government has confirmed these options. As for Hilary Cass, her courage earned her the title of life peer.
The Cass report helps to move the lines; New York Times, who previously supported medicalization, is more nuanced. In Great Britain, after the report was contested by the main doctors' union, 1400 doctors published their disagreement, "not in our name," and expressed their support for Cass.
In France, the news was reported in various ways by the daily newspapers on April 10, 2024. Le Monde published a factual article only in English, as discreetly as possible, faithful to his activism and his ideological blindness which made him the relay of the trans utopia – he thus refused all the platforms of the Little Mermaid. Conversely, Le Figaro published a long article summarizing the Cass report.
Finally, the last chapter details the clinical proposal of Caroline Éliacheff and Céline Masson: pubertal sexuation anxiety (PSA), a proposal published in the French Journal of Psychiatry (online). Both describe the symptoms previously associated with gender dysphoria, which often refer to other pathologies: eating disorders; social anxiety; depression; a history of sexual assault or post-traumatic stress; attention deficit disorder and autism spectrum disorders. Young people who are unhappy with their own skin are too often self-diagnosed with "gender dysphoria" and begin extensive treatment. Psychologists draw recommendations similar to those of the Cass report.
This book is highly recommended for parents of adolescents or young adults with gender issues, so that they can appreciate the ideological dimension underlying transaffirmative medicine. More broadly, this book provides accurate and educational information to anyone of goodwill who wants to learn about a burning social issue. Along with the Little Mermaid Observatory and the legislative battle led by the two authors, this book is a crucial part of the effort to alert public opinion to the health scandal of the century.
